Recently, I had to add a perfect squared CardView and I wanted to achieve this without hardcoding its width and height. I happily discovered the power of ConstraintLayout. And so this is how I managed to create a perfect square which should work on every dimension. Heres some sample code that I used to create […]
Making Your Wallpaper Respond to Real-World Weather A beautiful sky gradient is a good start, but what makes Seasons Live Wallpaper feel special is that it reacts to the actual weather outside your window. Rain particles drift down when it’s raining. Snow accumulates during winter storms. Fog creeps in on humid mornings. Lightning flashes light
The Hidden Cost of Eager Collections Kotlin’s collection functions — map, filter, flatMap — are a joy to use. But they share one characteristic that can quietly hurt your app: they’re eager. Each call processes the entire source and allocates a brand new intermediate list. Chain three or four of them on a list of
Rubber Duck Debugging with AI: The Modern Approach “Rubber duck debugging” is an old technique: you explain your bug to an inanimate object (a rubber duck), and in the process of explaining, you discover the problem yourself. Today’s AI assistants make this technique more powerful. Instead of talking to a duck, you can ask an
What Skills Are in Claude Code Once you’ve used Claude Code for a while you’ll notice you repeat the same prompts. “Create a new feature screen with a ViewModel and UiState.” “Add a Room entity and DAO for this model.” “Write a Hilt module that provides this repository.” These are perfect candidates for skills —
What If Your Wallpaper Knew the Weather? Most live wallpapers loop the same animation forever. They look nice for a day, then you forget they’re even there. Seasons Live Wallpaper is different — it’s a wallpaper that actually pays attention to the world around you. Built by an indie developer from Romania, Seasons brings four
The Part of Android Development “Nobody Enjoys” :P Writing tests and debugging are the two parts of Android development where most developers lose the most time. Tests feel like writing code twice, and debugging often means staring at a stack trace while trying to hold an entire call graph in your head. Claude Code doesn’t
A Familiar But Slightly Awkward Pattern If you’ve written Kotlin for a while, you’ve almost certainly written code like this: fun getActiveUsers(users: List): List { val result = mutableListOf() for (user in users) { if (user.isActive) result.add(user) if (user.isPremium) result.add(user.copy(label = “Premium”)) } return result.toList() // convert back to read-only } The pattern works, but
The Problem With Try-Catch Everywhere Exception handling in Kotlin (and Java before it) has always had a composability problem. Once you introduce a try-catch block, you break the expression-oriented flow of your code. You can’t easily chain operations, return from them in one line, or pass the “success or failure” result to another function without
Why Claude Code Is Worth Setting Up Properly for Android If you’ve tried using Claude Code for Android development without any configuration, you’ve probably found it helpful but inconsistent. It might suggest Retrofit when your project uses Ktor, generate Java when you want Kotlin, or miss your architectural conventions entirely. The difference between a generic
The Old Way: Manual Time Measurement If you’ve ever benchmarked a function in Kotlin or Android, you’ve probably written something like this: val start = System.currentTimeMillis() val result = doExpensiveWork() val elapsed = System.currentTimeMillis() – start Log.d(“Perf”, “doExpensiveWork took ${elapsed}ms, result=$result”) It works, but it’s noisy. You need three lines just to time one call,
AI-assisted development has moved well beyond autocomplete. Claude Code — Anthropic’s agentic coding tool — can read your project, reason about your architecture, write Kotlin, generate tests, and even help you debug Gradle. But like any powerful tool, it rewards those who know how to use it well. This guide walks you through everything you
Writing a Play Store listing that converts is harder than it looks. The character limits are tight, keywords matter, and you have about three seconds to grab attention. Here’s how I use Claude to make it easier — including the exact prompts I use for Seasons Live Wallpaper. Keyword Research Prompt “I have an Android
One of the most satisfying things to code is a particle system. Snowflakes, falling leaves, fireflies — simple physics, beautiful results. Here’s how Seasons Live Wallpaper handles its snow, and how you can build something similar. The Particle Data Class data class Snowflake( var x: Float, var y: Float, val radius: Float, // visual size
Learn how to get the Application Context anywhere in your Android Kotlin project using Hilt dependency injection. The modern, leak-safe replacement for the old Java singleton pattern.
